Wired: Open-Source Crowd Irked by SCO

“Open-source advocate Bruce Perens said that ‘SCO’s handful of
patents aren’t significant. Nobody’s ever won a trade-secret case
like this one.’

“Trade secrets are assumed not to be open knowledge and the
inner workings of Unix are far from mysterious.

“A full specification of Unix has been distributed by the U.S.
government as part of its POSIX standards. The Unix source code has
been licensed to universities for the past 30 years and it’s
typical for college computer science departments have a copy.

“Students have routinely had access to that source code and are
expected to use what they’ve learned during their entire careers.
And computer-science textbooks have documented every aspect of
operating-system internals for a long time, Perens said.

“‘The open-source community has been careful about other
people’s code for years,’ Perens said…”

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